Lumiera Summer Coding Report

Benny Lyons— August 2013 —

Although news reports have become rare, there is still activity taking place on
the project.

FrOSCon 2013 and the Annual Lumiera Project Meeting

The Froscon conference approaches.
As in previous years, members of the Lumiera project will meet again in the
South of Germany for a few days before heading off on our annual pilgrimage to
attend the FrOSCon conference.

The Lumiera project will have a developer room at the conference. We will again
hold introductory talks on Git and be available throughout the conference to
answer questions and to provide general assistance on Git.

If you would like to meet members of the project, you consider attending
the conference and visit us at our developer room. All are heartily welcome.

Documentation

Over the past few months, there has been some activity involved in
documentation. Organisation of the project’s documentation framework has been
discussed on IRC and on our mailing list. The general opinion of core
developers seems to be that the current structure should be retained, at least
for now, unless some other method is
proposed with compelling advantages over the current mechanism. The current
framework is documented
here.

The developers are aware of disadvantages in this framework and have undertaken
some steps to improve the situation.

One idea being pursued is to provide improved interconnectivity among the rapidly
growing bulk of documents within in the project. One major goal is to assist
authors in writing documentation, who should not have to be interrupted during the
writing process to locate reference documents. Manually generating indices or
other such peripheral work is often laborious work.

To improve this dilemma, developers are writing scripts to help automate
interconnectivity among documents. Although Asciidoc does provide a method to
specify links between one document and an other, this rapidly becomes
ineffectual as the number of documents explode. Furthermore, there is no
automated and easy way to produce a glossary of terms from the mass of
documentation.

As usual, Hermann has been the most productive developer over the past few
months. He has continued to progress on the player sub-system. He investigated
special modes of playback and implemented the interplay of frame dispatch and
job generation. Michael Fisher provided code for Jack audio integration.

Lumiera, The Project

Lumiera is still hampered by too few developers. Developers continue to be
active despite this, but project time-lines are scarce or have become
non-existent.
But participants are still active on the project’s IRC channel and the mailing list
has ongoing discussions.